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77 of 78 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Totally Worthwhile Upgrade, April 26, 2005
For fifteen years consumers have had to live with muddy-sounding, flat, low-rent mastering of this classic album. Now, finally, we've got something akin to actual hi-fi. The remastering is amazing. I'm listening to it right now on my wife's cheap Panasonic shelf system and can hear at least four new levels of nuance in just about every instrument in the mix. I honestly feel like I'm hearing the album for the first time.
Robert's voice in particular now actually sounds like it's coming through the flames at you, bounding down from his implosive pulpit like a hail of nails. This album has always been billed as the group's most depressing work -- a love letter to self hate and cryptic defeatism. It is. And beautifully so. Much of the current generation of corporate goth rockers (Manson et al) sound positively silly compared to this album.
As for the extras, well, they're a mixed bag. The studio demos often sound like completely different tracks (particularly the Hanging Garden demo which sounds more like something off "Faith.") These are worth the price alone. The live material is certainly inspired but most of it comes from audience recordings. Nonetheless, with live material from this era being so rare, anything is better than nothing.
Overall, I'd call this an automatic purchase for any Cure fan and certainly the preferred format for new fans to discover one of their best albums. Short of the work of groups such as Current 93, absolutely nothing else comes close to depicting the inherent inner-violence of depression. Pornography indeed.
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21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Early masterpiece., May 3, 2005
As each album had been getting progressively darker, there seemed little room for the Cure to go after "Faith", but "Pornography" found something new-- Robert Smith (guitar, vocals, keys), Simon Gallup (bass, keys), and Lol Tolhurst (drums, keys) constructed something dark, edgy, and frightening, taking the haunted mood of the last album and adding aggression and noise. The guitars have become more distorted and louder, and the drums have been moving into a somewhat more tribal pattern. The result is something much more in your face than anything the Cure had done.
Nowhere is this more obvious than the opener, probably best summed by the line "waiting for the death blow", "One Hundred Years" is full of edgy guitars and despondant passion. This sort of passionate delivery is a thread throughout the album-- take the powerful invocation of "I will never be clean again" on "The Figurehead" (over a great tribal drum pattern from Tolhurst) or the plodding but effective "Siamese Twins", rescued by a great Smith vocal.
While the album is pretty dark, it does get fairly varied-- "A Strange Day" seems almost optimistic (if you don't listen too closely to what Smith is singing) and the album does cover a number of moods, from rock ("One Hundred Years") to pseudo-ambient ("A Short Term Effect") to a sort of gothic progressive rock ("Cold"). Start to finish, its a fantastic album, and unlike many albums with a somewhat unvaried mood, this one is quite listenable.
As the rest of the Cure remasters, the sound is fantastic, crisp, clean, showing every nuance of the music and allowing its expressiveness to breathe. Again, the liner notes include a candid and honest essay about the creation of the album and the tour that followed, and a disc of bonus material is included. The demos, given the sort of bleak production of the music, are often quite telling on this one, and the live material is nothing short of fantastic, although the sound quality in both cases is not letter perfect for obvious reasons, but given the strength of the material, it carries through well enough.
If you're new to the Cure but used to kind of odd music, this might be a good place to start, its certainly one of their peaks, and thsi reissue only makes it sound better.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An essential reissue for Cure enthusiasts, April 27, 2005
I went into the record store I work at on Monday, my day off, just to buy the three reissues before anybody else had a chance. The first one I put in was 'Pornography', the one I was most excited about.
As for the remastered sound, this could be the least altered of the three reissues. The most noticeable improvement is certainly the element of "distance" given to Robert Smith's voice. His vocals have a permanent echo to them that float above the mix much clearer than in the past issuing of the album. The mix is considerably louder and given more bottom end. If anything is proven by modern remastering, however, it's that the actual production of the album is extremely dense and murky. 'One Hundred Years' with its "Phil Spector in Hell" sound doesn't reveal quite as much as a more subtle, spare song like 'The Figurehead' (the first guitar arpeggio, for instance, and even Smith's vocals).
The bonus material and packaging is first rate. Most of the rarities disc contains live material and rejected instrumental demos. The most fascinating part of this reissue is definitely the demo of 'The Hanging Garden'. It started out as a slower number with a more basic drum beat, and lyrics that would become parts of other 'Pornography' songs. It almost feels as if this were a creative start for the whole project. The 'Airlock' soundtrack shows Robert Smith's mental state probably more than anything on this whole reissue (you'll have to listen to it to know what I mean).
In my opinion, the sound on this reissue isn't quite as improved and clear as on the other two reissues, but it is a definite and genuine improvement over the original cd issue. The second disc and booklet makes this essential for major Cure fans.
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